in front of him, the first thing Johnson would do now is kill him.” She smiled sardonically, adding, “Unless Bobby beat him to it.” Postscript:
The most significant thing about “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book” was its widespread acceptance--if only for a moment--by intelligent, literate people, from an ACLU official to a Peabody Award- winning journalist to members of the intelligence community who knew that sort of thing actually does go on. Daniel Ellsberg said, “Maybe it was just because | wanted to believe it so badly.”
One caller claimed that he could determine, by feeding the article into a computer, whether Manchester had written the portions | published. Several individuals queried that final arbiter of truth, the Playboy Adviser. One reader “went out and bought the original Death of a President just to see if your parts would fit into the book--they did. Amazing!”
| also received a call from Ray Marcus, a critic of the Warren Commission Report, who had discovered a chronological flaw in my article. How could William Manchester leave something out of his book that was itself a report of something that he’ d left out of his book? Marcus deduced that 7he Realist must have been given the excerpts by a CIA
operative in order to discredit va/id dissent on the assassination.
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